It’s a kind of magic

About 15 years ago, Advertising was a prosperous industry and Creativity was the no.1 buzzword. Agencies used to compete with their works on festivals. Award winning creative directors were worshipped like near gods.

A number of advertising gurus were dissecting winning ads, trying to explain the essence of their success. Despite all the science around advertising, there was no secret recipe. Some ads simply had the magic to impress, most of them didn’t.

A couple of years later the advertising market became totally saturated. Creativity became a worn out phrase and clients didn’t want to spend a great amount of their budget on ideas. Lack of creativity was compensated by larger frequency and increased media costs.

Luckily, there was a new buzz word on the horizon: Virality.

Virality allowed spreading ideas with near zero media costs. Again there were a number of marketing and internet gurus, explaining how virality works, how the viral campaigns should be run, etc.

And again, there was no common secret recipe on how to ignite the magic spark.

Last years the hype throne has been taken by Gamification. Articles, books, conferences, Gartner predictions…. a perfect way to an overpromising catastrophe.

Just like creative ads and viral campaigns, each gamified solution needs a fair share of magic to truly light up. The magic doesn’t happen on command.

At JollyDeck we firmly believe in the potential of Gamification in learning processes.

We’re humble in what we’re doing, because we learned the hard way about all the things that might go wrong. Yet we’re passionate about what we do, and we know we’re on the right track.